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Tuesday, November 08, 2011

The Big Connection

Joachim and Caroline Murat

Students working on their Heritage projects in my SS10 classes are coming up with all kinds of interesting connections. Some of the stories are just interesting... overcoming adversity, immigration, settlement, heritage skills, many stories of leaving behind all manners of old world grief for new world promise. In some ways they are documenting a Canada that may no longer exist, an identity that has changed substantially in the last 10 years. Even the evolution of "family" is under scrutiny -- we have a few "go-arounds" for complicated histories with the goal that every student can get something powerful out of this project (class handout). All of the stories relate to big themes in the study of history and geography, make use of most of the benchmarks of historical thinking, and access the main curricular topics from every Social Studies course in our school -- I have no doubt this is the most valuable project we do in terms of "personalized learning" directed at higher level understanding of key curricular outcomes. Technology and mobile devices are being used for research and will be a part of the presentations, but are largely in the background to the big focus on students engaging in historical/narrative self-inquiry. I am also incredibly impressed with how the students carry their learning into other courses and have created a school-wide demand for more projects that engage their identities. George Abbott should really be paying me to write this stuff. I've been doing one form or another of this project for about 11 years and its the one that students tell me is most important. Some of the stories are connecting up to big events in history, and a few of them actually have key figures or participants in their family tree from major events in Canadian and world history.

Yesterday we discovered one of the coolest connections yet. Bethany, the same student whose Upper Canada heritage paralleled our New Home simulation, had a compelling name on her chart. Bonaparte. Caroline Bonaparte, Napoleon's youngest sister. Her family was not completely sure, but many of the sites she found using GenWeb tools appear to confirm the connections, with some compelling documentation. Funny, the only prep I did specifically for this class today was to post heritage research tools on the webriver blog. Her great-x5-grandmother, an Alice Murat, was the child of Joachim Murat, one of Napoleon's generals, and Caroline Bonaparte. Bethany has been pouring over histories, trying to figure out how the French elite ending up having Alice in Ireland (exile? grand-daughter not daughter?) and so on, and picking up an arsenal of world history along the way. Hopefully the connection is not just a family legend, but that's a story in itself, too. The name-game is cool enough, but the excitement of a student who is enthralled by a learning trajectory like this is very fun to witness. Napoleon is just one of the stories she is figuring out. She found a that one of her great-x5-grandfathers, a Duncan Livingstone, was killed at Waterloo (she noted the irony that he was a victim of her other relative Napoleon!). This fellow was an uncle to the famous David Livingstone. In her growing portfolio there is also a tank picture and WWII scrapbook that feature her great-grandfather, and a dozen other connections to many of the events and themes that have identified Canada in the 20th century. And there are 56 other students trying to make the same connections. Heady stuff, and I've been kept busy on the scanner and internet, assisting research and giving background to the places and historical events they are asking about... learning on demand. Check later for another student's "connected" experience.